“She had many firsts, such as being the first to understand the relationship of steroids to osteonecrosis, to point out the overall benefit of hydroxychloroquine in SLE when others doubted, etc. She was able to obtain a multipurpose arthritis center grant of which only five or sixwere awarded in the country.”
“Dr. Rothfield was internationally known. Whatever meeting I attended, whenever I spoke to someone who found out I was from the University of Connecticut, the first question they would ask was, ‘How is Dr. Rothfield?’”
Big Thinker
Santhanam Lakshminarayanan, MD, chief of the Division of Rheumatology at UConn School of Medicine, had his sights set on learning from the best many years ago. “Even back in my medical college days, Naomi was famous in India, where rheumatology had not yet become a subspecialty. Reading about lupus in my second year I knew I wanted to be rheumatologist. I sought her out and during my second year in residency I received a page from Dr. Rothfield, who said, ‘Laks, do you want to start your fellowship this July?’ I jumped at the chance, and she arranged everything. I skipped a year of residency. As my then program director in medicine said, ‘I can’t say no to Naomi.’”
“Naomi was an exceptional visionary,” he adds. “In the third year of my fellowship she reached out to a primary care practice that had an extra examination room. We would see patients there and then drive like the devil to get blood samples back to the lab at UConn, the whole process being geared toward making a permanent location so that UConn would bring me on as faculty—but that didn’t happen. However, 30 years later UConn purchased that very same practice.”
And if things weren’t 100% right for her patients, she let it be known.
Dr. Lakshminarayanan: “We had a lupus patient with chest pain come into the hospital. When Naomi heard the plan was to transfer her to Hartford Hospital because we didn’t have interventional cardiology—this was 1996—she was not happy. ‘What the hell kind of place are we running here? Is this a hospital or a hotel?’ And she was right. As an academic center, we should have been ahead of the curve.”
“On another occasion, it was 8 a.m. in clinic, and our patients were shivering. ‘This is ridiculous,’ Naomi said, and picked up the phone to express her displeasure. The repair people showed up, worked on the heating and left. Around 2 p.m. she picked up the phone again and said, ‘It’s too hot in here now.’ Back came the repair guys. At the end of clinic, I asked who she had called. ‘The dean,’ she replied.”
